


a twysted fairytale

by qqueenofhades



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Bookstores, F/M, Happy Ending, Literary References & Allusions, Pride and Prejudice vibes, Romantic Comedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-11
Updated: 2018-09-11
Packaged: 2019-07-11 03:37:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15963878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qqueenofhades/pseuds/qqueenofhades
Summary: Honestly, if Lucy Preston was going to move to London and discover a quirky bookstore managed by a handsome European guy, she was expecting it to be more like a Hugh Grant movie. Much more like Hugh Grant, in short. Not this unhelpful, uncommunicative pain in the ass.





	a twysted fairytale

Theodora Twyst is a bit of a legend in the London bookselling world. The humble family shop, as the story goes, was founded in 1906 by her father and uncle, Jack and John Twyst, as a one-room storefront on Oxford Street, and was taken over by Theodora herself in 1950, in which capacity she has run it ever since. Twyst’s hosts Literary Luncheons, a serried social event that has attracted a laundry list of famous twentieth-century writers, artists, and other public intellectuals, and boasts up to thirty miles of labyrinthine shelving and a nearly uncanny ability to get its hands on almost any title, no matter how rare or out of print. Its attractively shabby Victorian façade, out of place among the glittering modern developments of Oxford Street, is a favored Instagrammable spot. It is something of a cult tourist attraction, and nobody can deny that it has a lot of history.

As far as Lucy Preston, currently in her second hour of searching for a book in the guts of the venerable institution, can tell, it’s entirely the offbeat, historical-literary, old-fashioned eccentric vibe that keeps Twyst’s in business. God knows absolutely nothing else about it is intended to do that. Lovingly described as “if Kafka had gone into the bookselling trade” and “designed by a Victorian lunatic,” Twyst’s does not fuck around with its aesthetic. Not in the least. This might be because Theodora Twyst is an autocratic, aristocratic, iron-fisted, technology-hating old hag who refuses to install any modern conveniences in her store (forget cash registers, she won’t even allow _calculators)_ and is famous for firing employees at the drop of a hat and for any negligible reason. She never had children because she might have had to give them money, and appears to apply the same philosophy to her booksellers. They’re not allowed to handle cash, so the process of buying a book goes thusly:

  1. Actually _find_ your desired title, in a giant, dim maze of a store where the employees cannot look up anything on the computer, may or may not speak English, and appear to stop one step short of actively hating you, while the books are not categorized by author name, title, subject, or anything else intuitive, but by publisher;
  2. (Lucy is failing step one, get back to her in a minute);
  3. Locate a bookseller, overcome the above obstacles of them hating and/or not understanding you, and have them place your book in a brown paper bag, which is then deposited in a pneumatic tube and sent down to ground level;
  4. Queue to receive a paper invoice with the amount of your purchase written on it in, who the fuck knows, magical squid ink;
  5. Travel to the first floor, queue once again at the cashier’s desk, and pay the amount on said invoice (in cash, because no credit card machines), whereupon you are given a stamped Receipt of Purchase and have to sign your firstborn child over to an evil witch (probably named Theodora);
  6. Queue _a third time_ at the book pickup desk, where your precious volume, having presumably survived its journey through the creaky, dusty innards of this horrible place, is matched with your invoice and grudgingly permitted to leave the premises. Maybe. It seems unlikely.



The only reason anyone ventures in here, instead of a polite, modern, and sane bastion of British bookselling efficiency like Waterstone’s or Blackwell’s (or God forbid, W.H. Smith) is a) because apparently it’s a hip experience to come and be treated like a worm, and b) its range. As noted, it can find just about anything anyone would ever require – you could probably ask for a Gutenberg Bible and it would turn one up, while hating your guts the whole time – and Lucy has exhausted her search of the IHR and its partner libraries for this one book she really needs. She was advised to try here, but to block out an entire afternoon for it, which seemed a little strange to her at first. Now she’s starting to think it wasn’t nearly enough. Will they lock her in when they close, because they just don’t give a shit, or would they chase her out with brooms for breathing too much on the books?

Lucy mutters a curse under her breath as she turns through yet another passage of towering, glowering, old wooden shelves. Likely the only reason Theodora allowed electricity to be installed in here is because of the fire risk from gaslamps, and of those, half the bulbs appear to have been burnt out since the 1960s. The upper shelves are lost in gloom, you could definitely get to Narnia from some of those cabinets, and it would be a more magical, funky experience if Lucy wasn’t so frustrated. What even _is_ this place? A social experiment in masochism disguised as a business, a front for a secret MI6 torture cell, or what? Fifteen more minutes. If she can’t find the damn thing by then, screw professional thoroughness, she will just have to go without.

So Lucy thinks, with righteous indignation, and then knows that if she concedes defeat and goes home now, she will lie awake all night brooding over the failure and whether her manuscript would be irredeemably weakened without this reference. No good. She is actually going to have to ask somebody. There is someone who looks like a manager a few rows away, back turned to her as he shelves the higher reaches without a stepstool (he’s well over six feet tall), and she ventures timidly in his direction. “Ex – excuse me?”

He pauses, as if to be sure that she is speaking to him, then turns around slowly. He is wearing reading glasses, an olive-green sweater cuffed up over his forearms, and a nice pair of slacks (Theodora probably kills you with a crab fork if you come to work in jeans). “Yes?”

Well, at least he speaks English. Solid start. “I’m looking for _Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment and Social Radicalism_ by J.E.M. Radcliffe. I’ve tried the main stacks, and – ”

“Did you look up the publisher?” The manager seems annoyed that she has not bothered to learn the basic protocol of the shop before setting foot inside (which, in fact, she did). “Radcliffe was usually Adam Black, that’s two floors up.”

“I did look in the Adam Black section,” Lucy says. “And the A & C Black, Bloomsbury, and other subsidiary imprints sections. If you don’t have it, could you order it?”

The manager gives her a fish-eyed stare, as if he’s sure she hasn’t looked properly. As if she also hasn’t heard him the first time, he repeats, “Books are shelved according to publisher.”

“Yes, I know that. I’m at the IHR, they said you’d probably be able to track it down. It was last printed in 1974, but they also said that wasn’t a – ”

The manager waves a hand, as if he doesn’t care what they said. He returns to shelving, as if pretending Lucy is no longer standing right there, until she clears her throat, a little pointedly. “Could we possibly go look for it?”

He utters an aggrieved sigh, which he makes no attempt to disguise, and puts the books back down on the cart with a clunk. Then he swishes off through the shelves, not trying to let her keep up or looking around to see if she’s following, until they reach the elevator, which Lucy fully expects to be operated by a man in a fez. It’s not, but it bumps and creaks for thirty excruciating seconds, as she and her companion execute the accustomed straight-forward stares, until they step out on the floor in question, which Lucy is sure she has already combed through at least twice. It’s the same floor with the café, which you can bet does not have free wifi, and is popular among insufferably pretentious people because it does not use modern espresso machines, thereby rendering their drink more “authentic.” There are a lot of passive-aggressive handwritten signs everywhere about not using your phones, please (it is rumored that Theodora will ban you for life if she catches you), and the manager whisks through without a sideways look, into the Featherstone Books section way back in the corner, which Lucy didn’t realize was apparently another imprint of A&C Black. He scans the shelves up and down, then pulls out the book and thrusts it at her. “Is this it?”

Yes, it in fact is, and his tone implies that he has just done her a huge favor, it was easily available to locate, and he’s not sure why she just wasted his time like that. Cheeks stinging, Lucy starts to reach out for it, before remembering that it cannot be sullied by her mortal hands just yet. “Yes,” she says, as politely as she can. “I’ll take it, please.”

He snorts, whisks out one of the paper bags, and encases the book in it, heading over to the wall to deposit it into the tubes. With a thunk and a gulp, it is gone, and they stand there for a further thirty excruciating seconds. The name badge around his neck on a lanyard reads _G. Flynn, Chief Comptroller General._ Is that even a job title? Couldn’t they just say _manager,_ or is that too common? And this guy seems to be chief-a-lot-of-other-things, yes, but that’s probably just the quality Theodora values in her employees. If she values any of them.

G. Flynn, Chief Comptroller General, having loathingly executed the function for which he is presumably paid, nods brusquely in the direction of the stairs. “The invoice desk is that way,” he says, as if to inform her that she can now GTFO. “Have a pleasant day.”

With that, he strides off again, as Lucy stares after him, opens her mouth, shuts it, wonders if she’s going to return here even if she desperately needs a book and there is nowhere else to find it, and collects herself sufficiently to make for the invoice desk. It is staffed by one employee aged approximately eighty-seven, hauling out a giant paper records book to check the price of each title that the customer tells her, and while there are only three people in line ahead of Lucy, it takes six years. When she finally has the invoice in hand, she goes down to the payment desk, is lucky that she just has enough in cash (after digging through her wallet for the extra twenty-pence piece for a mortifyingly long amount of time), and is issued her warrant of bail – sorry, purchase. She walks down to the ground floor, queues again (maybe this is designed for some secret fetish pleasure for Brits? They _love_ standing in a good line), and finally, _finally_ gets her paper-wrapped book.

As she is handed it, Lucy glances over to see G. Flynn, etcetera, making someone else’s life miserable by the “New Releases” display, which is a bit of a joke for Twyst’s to have since Theodora thinks all books published after 1990 are liberal rubbish and makes it as difficult as possible for anyone to acquire anything they might enjoy reading. Their gazes lock for a moment, and then Lucy, deciding that she better get out of here before they break out the thumbscrews, runs for it.

***

Lucy Preston didn’t entirely intend to come to London. She doesn’t know that she didn’t _not_ intend to come to London, but either way, here she is, and Twyst’s isn’t the only deliberately baffling bane of her existence. It is, however, at least the only one she can leave.

For technical purposes, she is here on a two-year fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London, one of those temporary funded positions for early-career academics, intended to produce a publishable monograph at the end of it. Lucy has one book to her name, as well as her doctoral dissertation, three articles, and several chapters in edited volumes, but she managed to write a good proposal and it was impelled largely by desperation anyway. She has been teaching at Stanford, her alma mater, since she finished her doctorate, and was recently informed that her contract had not been renewed. Weird circumstances about whether her job was tenure-track or not, whether the department could still afford it, or some other murky subsection of university politics and budget requirements. Long story short, Lucy was SOL. Frantically applied to anywhere that might need a historian of her specialties, which is always a horrible, horrible soul-crushing roulette, and was lucky that this placement came through. So she’s moved to London for two years. After that, who knows. The reassuring academic thought is that if you can’t get another job and pay back the years of debt accrued in your noble pursuit of higher knowledge, you can always jump off a bridge.

Lucy likes the IHR, and there is, of course, the glamor of living in London, the artful pictures and the well-known landmarks and the stylish aesthetic. At least, on the surface. Her fellowship is a decent amount, but it’s not exactly gigabucks. Her first experience of the London rental market was, as it is for everyone, a nasty shock. People were advertising “lovely, spacious one-bedroom in great shared house!” for £750, which upon actual inspection turned out to be a windowless closet with a twin bed crammed in, a converted hallway, or something else ridiculous, and forget about having your own place. Anything under £1000 monthly is shared, and that is pick-your-poison with roommates. Lucy is lucky to have settled in a flat near Portobello Road, an extremely chic part of town (she lives in the small slice of it that normal people and their three good friends can afford), with two female housemates, a Latvian who works in IT and a Chinese master’s student at King’s College. They are nice, polite, and quiet, and Lucy doesn’t see them very much. So it works out.

That is not to mention the eye-watering food and drink expense if you want a night on the town, the weather (as a rule, terrible), the crowds of tourists everywhere, the daily crunch on the Tube with a million other commuters, the constant train strikes, ticket price hikes, and transport chaos, the worrisomely rising knife-crime and moped-gang-robbery rate, the looming specter of Brexit, and all the rest. Not to mention, apparently, the world’s proudly worst bookstore (is it run by Aziraphale from _Good Omens,_ making sure none of his customers ever buy anything? Seems possible). Not that Lucy doesn’t like London. Despite all this, she still does. But it’s… a lot, sometimes. It’s a lot. Her mom died from cancer last year and things were always difficult with Carol. Lucy feels that her mother would judge her dimly for not having “done well enough” to stay at Stanford, and there was other family drama. A clean start across the pond didn’t seem like the worst thing ever.

Lucy is still feeling a bit down as she rides home, hanging onto a strap as for some reason best known to the TfL, the Tube remains delayed at Edgware Road for fifteen minutes. It’s not that she couldn’t handle some idiot being rude to her, but she just feels very shiftless right now, lonesome and adrift. She has been here for five months, and while she’s made a few acquaintances at the IHR, she doesn’t have anyone recognizable as a real friend. She used to call her sister every weekend for hours, until Amy told her to go out more and enjoy life. Lucy’s trying, but she’s an introvert, she’s used to books, she’s used to familiar places and set routines. If she goes out to the IHR, works all day, and then goes home, which she usually does, she can go weeks without talking to anyone outside the necessities.

The Tube finally starts moving, and Lucy gets off at Westbourne Park, walking the five minutes down Tavistock Crescent to her flat. She opens the garden gate and goes down to the lower-level entrance, unlocks the door, and steps inside. Well, at least she doesn’t have to go back to Twyst’s ever again. Just scour the Radcliffe book, and –

It’s then, of course, as Lucy removes the brown paper, that she realizes there has been a mix-up. The book inside is not hers, but rather some German-language brick of political philosophy. The pickup desk has made a mistake. Which, you know, seems unavoidable with this byzantine, ridiculous, fucking idiotic system employed by nobody else in the modern world, and which basically ruins the entire godforsaken afternoon spent trawling around that place to start with. She stares at it for almost a full minute. Then she puts her head down on the table, starts dully banging it over and over, and wonders what the odds are of knocking herself out. It seems entirely more pleasant than the idea of a repeat.

Lucy spends the evening on her laptop, scouring Abebooks and Amazon and Bloomsbury’s back catalogue and anywhere else she can think of that might have a copy of this one book. She finds it in a couple places, but priced well over £100, not including shipping, and to say the least, Lucy is not paying £100+ for a book that was just in her hands for the cover price of £4. If she is actually going to be as academically conscientious as she would like, she is going to have to go back to Twyst’s, see if her book is still there or was handed off to another patron by mistake, or otherwise get them to re-order it. Please, God. No.

After one final round of checks cannot get her anything lower than £87.50 with free shipping to orders within the UK, Lucy gives up. She might as well go tomorrow morning, get it over with, and potentially salvage time to work in the afternoon. She wonders if she can live with herself if she just doesn’t get the list of 150 primary sources that Radcliffe itemizes, then decides that she’ll kick herself forever if she doesn’t. Maybe she can drink heavily beforehand. Or otherwise brace herself for the experience.

With a deep sigh, Lucy closes her laptop. She places the incorrect book in a spare paper bag, since she doesn’t want them refusing to return it because there was a tiny smudge on one of the pages or what-the-fuck-ever, and goes to bed.

Lucy gets up the next morning, gets dressed like a warrior venturing into battle, swings her bag over her arm, and marches out. It is February, which is a grim month everywhere and particularly in London. The holidays are over, everyone’s depressed, the days still aren’t very long, and it’s a constant grey sheet of rain or sleet or some other associated sludge. The ads on the Tube (Circle and Bakerloo, via King’s Cross) are trying very hard to flog her an affordable tropical vacation, which sounds like a great idea, and Lucy gets off at Oxford Circus, briefly delayed by her Oyster card deciding that it has insufficient funds. This feels like a bad omen, but she tops up, exits, and turns down Oxford Street. Twyst’s is undeniably an institution, but it is the bane of London property developers’ existence, given as it stubbornly occupies a prime piece of retail real estate for well under present market value, refuses to update its exterior or otherwise look like the rest of the shopping drag, and mostly serves to make people mad and not want to spend any more money for the day. If the developers could burn it down and make it look like an accident, they probably would.

Lucy pulls her jacket closer and heads down the street, reaches the rotating doors, and pushes inside the bookstore that time forgot. The “Customer Service” desk, which in this place feels like it’s definitely a piece of deliberately ironic performance art, is on the first floor, so she takes the stairs up rather than risk another elevator ride of doom with a judgmental bookseller. It’s early enough that there are not many patrons there, so she makes for it –

– only to screech to a halt when she sees that the sentry manning the barricades is none other than G. Flynn, Chief Complete Git, who is leaning on the antique-wood desk and doing a pile of account books. He scribbles quickly and confidently, without need for a forbidden calculator, and he’s wearing another sleeves-rolled-up sweater and the reading glasses. Lucy wishes that she did not notice that it’s kind of attractive, in a mature-nerd sort of way. He’s probably in his forties, with dark hair that does a flip over his forehead, a long nose, and a carved set to his features that looks Slavic, which his accent yesterday also sounded like. Honestly, if she was going to move to London and discover a quirky bookstore managed by a handsome European guy, she was expecting it to be more like a Hugh Grant movie. _Much_ more like Hugh Grant, in short. Not this unhelpful, uncommunicative pain in the ass.

After another long pause, when nobody else appears to be returning to “serve” any “customers,” Lucy reminds herself that to the victor go the spoils. She removes the book from her purse and walks up. “Hello. Excuse me? I was here yesterday.”

Flynn looks up from his accounting and sees her. This does not actually make him stop what he’s doing, as he spends several more seconds filling in a column of figures as if in hopes she’ll take the hint and go away, then puts down the pen. “Yes?”

“I got the wrong book.” Lucy removes the volume of German political philosophy and shows him her receipt. “I wanted the – ”

“Yes, the Radcliffe book, I’m aware.” Flynn scowls, as if to say such a pointless excursion has now been permanently burned into his brain, thanks. “They must have given you the wrong one at the pickup desk.”

With that, he appears set to continue what he’s doing, apparently under the impression that that has solved her problem. It’s only when she loudly clears her throat that he looks up again, aggravated. “Yes?”

“Could you possibly exchange it?” Lucy says. “Or see if someone grabbed mine?”

Flynn lets out a small sigh, puts down the pen once more, and stalks out from behind the desk. He removes the offending book from the counter, tucks it under his arm, and sails downstairs like a man-of-war, Lucy blowing in his wake, until they reach the pickup counter. Flynn inquires who was working here around 4:15pm yesterday, and if it can be ascertained if they removed the wrong book from the book-trolley system. Lucy figures that whoever did it is definitely toast, and feels bad for the clerk, but thinks they can get a far more satisfactory job almost anywhere else. Theodora Twyst is also known for being one of the business owners who has fought every proposed raise in the minimum wage or labor rights protections or workers’ unions; she is committed to being a Dickens villain, dammit. She tends to sack her employees just before they’ve worked there six months, which would give them some kind of legal recourse or unemployment compensation. Lucy wonders if she has ever been visited by three ghosts on Christmas Eve, but if so, it didn’t stick.

It takes a while, but Flynn finally decides that it looks like they gave her book to someone else, who has not yet come in to exchange it. Twyst’s, of course, has no such thing as a customer database or electronic record (they won’t take orders by phone), so they don’t have any way to track down who that could have been. Flynn says that if she comes back in a week, they can see if the Radcliffe book has been returned. The tone in his voice clearly says that he is very much hoping she goes and dies in a ditch instead.

Lucy tries to be polite about this, but this is getting absurd. She has heard there’s a very good secondhand and antiquarian bookstore in Swansea, in Wales, so she might take the train there this weekend and check them out, but that will cost her through the nose in a last-minute rail ticket, and this mix-up is Twyst’s fault anyway. It could have been completely avoided if they didn’t run their business like maniacs, and they have no apparent interest in sorting it out or retaining her as a customer. As Flynn is starting off with a look that warns the current clerk that they could also get fired, just for the hell of it, Lucy says, “So that’s… that’s it?”

Flynn stops and scowls over his shoulder at her. “What?”

“You lost the book,” Lucy points out. “You might offer to re-order it for me, or maybe give me a partial refund, or apologize for the inconvenience. I’m just spitballing here.”

Flynn looks at her as if she’s started speaking fluent ancient Persian. _“I_ didn’t lose the book.”

“You know what I mean. The store did.” Lucy is not going to turn into one of those insufferable Let Me Speak To Your Manager soccer moms, not least because Flynn _is_ the manager and the next person up the food chain is probably Theodora herself, which is clearly going to be a disaster, but still. “How do you guys think a business is even run?”

Flynn continues to stare at her as if nobody has ever asked him this question before. Finally he says, “Are you displeased about something, Miss Preston?”

Her name has been written on her receipt, which is how he knows it, but Lucy has to fight an icy urge to tell him it’s _Dr._ Preston. She might anyway, because it’s irritating to be called “Miss” when you’re a mid-thirties professional with a doctorate, but she knows it’s because Theodora, who’s eighty-something, still insists on being addressed as “Miss Twyst,” and Flynn is probably just in the habit. “Yeah,” she says instead. “I’m a little displeased about something. Could you not tell?”

Flynn lets out an exasperated-sounding breath. “I don’t know what you expect me to do about it. It was a mistake. The clerk responsible will be dealt with.”

“Fired?” Lucy volleys back, before she can think better of it. “Or does this warrant the iron maiden?”

There’s a long pause. Flynn looks to be struggling to figure out if she was making a joke, or perhaps even if he knows what a joke is. “Miss Preston – ”

“Forget it,” Lucy says wearily. She’ll just cough up for a last-minute ticket to Swansea, rather than hanging around in Satan’s lending library any longer. “Have a nice day, Mr. Flynn.”

And with that, she goes.

***

Garcia Flynn certainly did not intend to end up in London. He ran here, four years ago, as the first place he could think of and which had an affordable airline deal out of Zagreb (£59 one way, and he wasn’t intending to come back) and was planning to stay a few weeks before he kept on going. Then he ended up with a job, and a small bedsit in Ealing, and he kept telling himself he’d go eventually, but he hasn’t.

The bedsit in Ealing has turned into a modest one-bedroom flat in Stroud Green, from whence he can take the Victoria line right to work, though he himself is still not sure how it turned into almost half a decade. Part of the attraction of the job at Twyst’s was because it was somewhere he, theoretically, did not have to deal with the public, could hide among the books, and probably be fired in a few months anyway and drift off to wherever he was going next. Except he then accidentally turned into the one employee that even the cranky old bag couldn’t do without, and now he runs the madhouse. Fitting, really.

Flynn is well aware that his employer is, by any ordinary standard, a generally terrible person. She brags about never having done her own housework or cooked her own meals, drinks champagne every morning and evening, and owns an ermine-trimmed coat that does in fact make her look like Cruella de Vil. The family’s full surname is not just double-barreled, oh no. It is _triple-_ barreled – Twyst-Wykeham-Thoresby, which frankly ought to be fined, and various cousins are explorers with knighthoods and venerable BAFTA-winning actors. They are of the deeply starchy, old-school, ludicrously classist and snobby mold of uber-posh British elite, and while promoting him to Chief Comptroller General, Theodora sighed and remarked it was still a pity that he was _foreign._ As a Croatian citizen, Flynn has the right to live and work in any EU member state, though Boris Johnson and his gang of bastards are busily trying to take that away. Theodora is also fond of hiring international students on the belief that she could deliberately underpay them, which got her into trouble with HM Revenue and Customs a few years ago. Honestly, yes. This does look more like a three-dimensional Rorschach test than a business.

And yet, Flynn doesn’t care. Twyst’s became his sanctuary, his refuge, and since Theodora, pushing ninety, can’t exactly swoop around with the same ease as before, she has designated him as her man on the spot. Sack him and this place absolutely would crumble like a house of cards, and Flynn thinks Theodora has become almost fond of him, in her tyrannical-old-dame way. Once every few months, she invites him out to Beaconsfield Abbey, her country house in Hertfordshire, a restored twelfth-century monastery with rambling grounds and an eclectic assortment of wild animals, including some truly terrifying peacocks. They go over the accounts and business matters, decide on any new Literary Lunch guests they would like to invite, and then eat dinner more or less in total silence, an arrangement that suits them both. If you get a few after-supper sherries into her, however, Theodora has a wicked wit and a ready willingness to share horrible gossip about famous people she hates. Flynn has learned about the peccadilloes of almost all of London high society and plenty of names you would recognize in a newspaper, and Theodora is particularly fond of the story of what happened to a particularly boring guest at one Literary Luncheon. As she puts it, “He spoke for one and a half hours. A man in front of my father fell asleep, so he hit the chap with the toastmaster’s gavel. The man said: ‘Hit me again. I can still hear him’.”

Perhaps, Flynn thinks, they are a pair of misanthropes who are content at shutting the rest of the world out and that’s why they get along, but it wasn’t always like that for him. The wealthy and childless Theodora, whose husband died (possibly with relief) in 1994, has a nephew who is heir apparent to the bookselling empire, though she repeatedly threatens to disinherit him over his determination to modernize the place the instant she’s dead. Flynn, on the other hand, doesn’t hate people so much as he doesn’t understand them, doesn’t do well with them, and just wants to be left alone to hide from the pain of losing the few of them he did love. His mother, wife, and daughter all died within a few years of each other – Maria at the age of just sixty-seven in 2012, worn out from years of conflict with his damn father, and Lorena and Iris in 2014, carjacked and shot in broad daylight in the ferry terminal in Split, Croatia, as the family was returning from an Italian vacation. Flynn fought off the attackers with his bare hands, but not in time to save his girls. The case made the regional news, there were a lot of well-meant offers of help, but he couldn’t stand it. He had to run, he had to get out of the country and not come back, and now, here he is. He figures he’ll stay until Theodora dies and her nephew takes over. Then he can leave and go – wherever.

Garcia Flynn has, therefore, become so used to the anachronistic, isolating, infuriating time-warp that Twyst’s exists in – he swears he stepped out one late night into 1880s London, it was a very strange experience, as if there is in fact is some real way that this place holds a gate open to the past – that he’s rather indignant about this Lucy Preston walking in and expecting it to operate any other way. What does she expect him to do, personally track down whoever her book was given to by accident and retrieve it for her? Twyst’s, to say the least, does not subscribe to any of that “the customer is always right” nonsense. The customer can go fuck themselves with a first edition, although most first editions are valuable and should not be used for self-fornication. (The store, not that shockingly, has posted losses for many years, but Theodora has enough of a fortune to keep it running anyway.)

And yet, something about the incident sticks with Flynn, as he goes about the usual rounds of shelving, accounting, scheduling, stocking, receiving, and – once the unfortunate clerk who muffed it yesterday arrives for his shift at 2pm – informing him that he will not be returning to work after today, please make sure to collect any leftover things out of the back and hand in his name badge. The kid is horrified and apologetic and wants to know if there’s any way he can have his job back, it was an honest end-of-the-day mistake, he really loves working here (that has to be a first), please, Mr. Flynn. He’s never had any other incidents (which, for Theodora, can include “talking loudly,” “enjoying football,” and “voting Labour.”) _Please._

Flynn thinks about it, knows that Theodora would insist the malfeasant was sacked anyway, and finally, grudgingly changes his mind and makes it a two-week probationary period instead. If the kid does everything absolutely perfectly for the fortnight, he’s back to regular status. Any more screw-ups, and _whoosh._

The kid thanks him fervently, puts on his apron and punches his time card (yes, an actual yellow-stock card in an authentic iron puncher, like he’s clocking in in a factory during the Industrial Revolution) and scuttles out to the desk. Flynn watches him go, wonders what has gotten into him, and decides that he can always fire him later. But it’s Friday, and he has a lot of things to get done before the weekend, so he doesn’t need to add finding a new clerk to the pile. Because the London job market is what it is, there is never any shortage of applications from broke students eager to be paid £7.15 an hour and brag to their friends that they work at the infamous Twyst’s. For now, however, Flynn doesn’t need the hassle.

He works steadily, glances up every so often to see if the other customer has brought the damn Radcliffe book back yet, and finds himself increasingly annoyed that they haven’t. They are prejudicing the usual course of operations in this place, they did not lawfully have an entitlement to that book, and if they don’t do so, it will put more work on Flynn’s plate that he does not feel like carrying out. Maybe he’ll just go home tonight and see if he can get one cheap on the Internet. Then when Lucy Preston comes back to bother him again, he can foist the volume off on her and everyone can get on with their lives.

Flynn stays late to finish the monthly books, puts them in his bag to physically take to the accountant on Monday, and then finally locks up and leaves around eight PM. It’s a slushy, miserable night as he walks toward Oxford Circus to get the Underground, and he turns up his jacket collar, waiting on the chilly platform until the Brixton-bound train pulls in. What’s so special about this damn book, anyway? Couldn’t Lucy have acquired it somewhere else? “Refund,” what does she think this is? _Tesco?_

Flynn huffs and puffs and grumbles about it all the way home, gets off at Finsbury Park, and walks the ten minutes to his flat. Once he’s unlocked the door and shucked his dripping jacket, he makes dinner on the hob, tips it into a bowl, and turns on the television to learn about whatever ill-advised thing the Government has done now. But it’s background noise, a trick to pretend he doesn’t come home alone to an empty house every night, and finally he growls and gets out his computer. A few minutes of Googling later, he has been shocked to discover that this book, to judge from what the internet is charging for it, apparently contains the formula for the Philosopher’s Stone. No wonder Lucy seemed a little annoyed.

He pushes aside the brief twinge of guilt, reminding himself that it’s not _his_ fault said volume went unfortunately astray, and that he has no further responsibility to do anything about it. This gets him through the rest of dinner and an update on Brexit negotiations (failed), before he sighs very loudly and looks up the price of a train ticket to Swansea tomorrow. There’s a fine old secondhand bookstore there, Goldbridge’s, that might be able to lay hands on it, and Flynn knows the owner, since they’re both in the business. Cover his bases. Simple.

The answer is that there’s a direct service from Paddington to Swansea, three hours each way, and a return ticket costs upwards of £100, because the privatized British railway system is almost as bad as Twyst’s and everyone responsible for it should be taken out back and shot. Flynn has a railcard, which brings the price down somewhat, but he can’t help but wonder what he’s doing as he clicks to buy the ticket. Maybe he’s just been miffed by Lucy’s slights on Twyst’s, wants to show her that it can in fact do something as simple as procuring a requested book. And he has nothing better to do tomorrow, anyway.

Ticket purchased, Flynn takes a shower and goes to bed, wakes up the next morning, and discovers that it is, as the locals say, really pissing it down, which almost makes him decide to call the whole thing off and stay in bed. But if he does, he will be a hundred pounds out of pocket to no point and purpose, and his competitive streak has been activated. He gets up, dresses, and splashes stubbornly off to Paddington.

His train manages to be ten minutes late even though this is its point of origin, and once he is finally en route, Flynn leans back and lets his mind wander for most of the journey. Lucy said she was at the IHR, right? He resists a momentary urge to look her up on his phone. She’ll probably turn up anyway, he doesn’t need to go hand-delivering it. He is still annoyed with her, besides. _Refund._ Honestly.

It is almost noon when the train gets to Swansea. Some of the rain has tapered off, but it is still dank, grey, and cold as Flynn feeds his ticket to the barrier gods, strides out of the station, and heads down the hill. Swansea is an attractive coastal city that does an excellent tourist trade in the summer, but it’s the offseason and everything is closed and shuttered, buried in thick Atlantic fog. The wind is damp and salty, blowing in off the bay, and Flynn squints, raising a hand, as he turns onto Wind Street, a pretty treed thoroughfare lined with restored Victorian buildings and upmarket shops. Goldbridge’s is about halfway down, and he reaches it, pushes inside with the clank of an out-of-tune bell, and heads for the front desk.

Unlike Twyst’s, Goldbridge’s actually believes in serving customers and making their lives easier, and while the pleasant, bespectacled young woman doesn’t know Flynn, she is happy to look up the book (on a computer, what heresy) and announce that they might indeed have a copy upstairs. They head up the creaking steps, since Goldbridge’s is a photogenic “Fantasy Bookstore”-type place, actually maintains social media accounts, has wifi, and hosts events for books published in this millennium. The young woman locates the Radcliffe book within five minutes and pulls it off the shelf, where it has been filed alphabetically and in the correct section. At this, Flynn is forced to admit, as he does every time he is obliged to enter a bookstore run by human beings, that his current place of employment is, well, a little idiosyncratic. All right, fucking insane. But still.

Flynn has just paid £2.00 for the book, since Goldbridge’s charges half the cover price for all its secondhand stock, and put it in his bag, when the door tinkles again. “Excuse me,” a voice says behind him. “Do you have a copy of – oh.”

There is a long, awkward pause. Then Flynn turns around to behold none other than a pink-cheeked, chilly-looking Lucy Preston, who in turn has stalled in the doorway and is staring suspiciously at him. It is clear that she was, to say the least, not expecting to encounter the bookselling grump from yesterday in another bookstore two hundred miles west in a different country, where he once more appears to have turned up for the express purpose of thwarting her. They lock eyes for another deeply uncomfortable moment. Then Flynn, rather than mentioning that he just bought the book that he knows she is here to acquire (though hey, it _could_ be something else, you never know) clears his throat, dashes past her to the door like he just robbed the place, and scoots into the street.

Of course, the pleasant young Goldbridge’s employee tells Lucy that the gentleman in here just now bought their last copy, sorry, and it is less than ten minutes later when she catches up with him across from Swansea Castle. Upon spotting her out of his peripheral vision, Flynn’s solution is to walk faster and pretend he has gone blind, but Lucy veers into his path with surprising steeliness for a woman who is half his size. “Hey,” she says. “Hey, excuse me. Excuse me!”

Since she has hold of his jacket sleeve, and there is no way to proceed without physically dragging her, Flynn pauses, then comes to a pointed halt. They regard each other for several moments. Then he says, “May I help you?”

“Is this some kind of – ” Lucy looks as if she is beginning to suspect that Twyst’s, the entire institution, was designed to troll her, Lucy Preston, personally. “I – did I insult you or something? Is that what’s going on?”

Flynn regards her with his best impassive expression, which is in fact intended to conceal a low-level panic. The only woman he speaks with on any sort of consistent basis is Theodora, and even he is aware that the rules of the road in the store might not apply out here. What should he do? Blow it all up and run away? That seems like a decent option. Finally he says, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Are you trying to hold the book for ransom?” Lucy digs into her purse for her wallet. “Honestly, at this point, I will pay whatever for the damn thing. I’m already out of pocket for the train ticket, I might as well come away from here with something.”

Flynn feels another brief stab of guilt, which once more is not his fault. He _could_ offer to reimburse her for her trouble, but she traveled here as a private citizen, it’s not like Twyst’s owes her the money, and while his salary is livable (barely), it is still far from bounteous. As Lucy removes her wallet and starts digging around for quid coins, he says belatedly, “No. That’s – no, you don’t have to do that.”

“Then what _do_ you want?” She is clearly tired of this runaround. “Buy out the rivals so I’d have no choice but to re-order it from you? I asked to do that the first time I came back in!”

Long pause. They continue to stare at each other. Then Flynn fumbles in his bag, pulls out the book, and shoves it at her like a hot plate of pancakes that might burn him if he holds it for too long. Then, while she is still baffled, he wheels around and rushes away.

***

Lucy returns from Swansea in a state of utter bewilderment. Yes, she does have the damn book, and does not have a substantial chunk of her last deposit, but she still can’t figure out what on earth Flynn was playing at (has she ever learned his first name? She can’t recall that she has. It starts with _G,_ that’s all she knows). Was he sent to nab the book and then panicked when she caught him? Buying it to re-stock the shelves and was induced to actually let her have it instead? For all she knows, this is also a standard business practice of Twyst’s, and she has better things to do with her time than trying to guess. Anyway, at least the saga is finally over. _Hopefully._

Lucy works for the next few weeks, makes decent progress on combing through Radcliffe’s list of primary sources, and notes down the ones that seem most relevant to her argument. Her book is about the development of intellectual secret societies in the late eighteenth century, their roots and influence in Enlightenment-era politics in both America and Europe, and as you can imagine, doing research in this subject leads you to a lot of very interesting wormholes/claims that the Freemasons/Illuminati/Rosicrucians/Templars are actually alive today and _right behind you,_ controlling the world. While Lucy is not a conspiracy theorist, she wants to write, if at all possible, a sober and informed scholarly history of this, since it’s very interesting, and does not want to attract a bunch of loonies thinking she is the new Supreme Prophet, especially given her family’s own involvement with something similar to this once upon a time. So she has to take extra care with all her material and to follow up leads that she knows are good, and all the printed versions of the primary sources are mostly nineteenth-century French and German editions. She manages to track down some of the more famous essays and books in the IHR’s libraries or nearby, but that still leaves her with a solid half-dozen that her best bet to acquire, most unfortunately, is at Twyst’s.

Lucy supposes that if she doesn’t want to go to frigging Bavaria and try to access the original copies of Adam Weishaupt’s notebooks (which she may eventually do, but anyway), then she is going to have to once more subject herself to the… whatever… of G. Flynn’s company. Twyst’s doesn’t have a website, so she can’t look up his first name, but by searching for reviews of various Literary Luncheons and other events, she finally discerns that it is, in fact, Garcia. There’s even an article in _GQ_ about him being the right-hand man of the “famously eccentric – and grumpy – London bookstore,” for which he does not appear to have said just about anything to the reporter. Lucy wonders how _that_ interview went. Probably disastrously, given his social skills. But she’s not assembling a blackmail dossier on him, though who knows, you might actually need that. She just needs some damn books.

Finally, when she has determined that the items in question are not going to magically materialize on her desk overnight, Lucy makes her list, thinks there’s always a chance that she deals with someone else, and plans her attack with exacting precision. It is March, the days are a little bit longer, the trees are green, turn over a new leaf and all. She marches into Twyst’s at 9:30am the next morning, and since she knows that even these are unlikely to be on the shelf, heads straight for the dreaded customer service desk.

Today, it is manned by one of the young student employees whose English is not that great – he does in fact want to help, bless his heart, but they just cannot understand each other – and Lucy is just wondering if Google Translate would be any use here, when the employee spots someone over her shoulder and waves like a drowning man trying to attract rescue at sea. Lucy somehow knows who it is without turning around, and indeed, Flynn strides up, says something to the employee in his mother tongue, and the kid scuttles off in relief. Then Flynn realizes that it’s her, and looks on the brink of following suit. What is _wrong_ with this man?

“Hello.” Lucy figures that is the best way to begin the conversation. “I have some more books that I’m probably going to need to order. They’re old nineteenth-century French and German editions, I don’t know if they’re still in print. So I don’t know if we need to go through the same ordeal as last time, but I’m hoping not.”

Flynn remains looking like a deer in headlights for several moments longer, then nods crisply and thrusts out his hand for the list. By Twyst’s standards, the process is almost efficient. Flynn fills out an order form, promises to contact her when they arrive (will they burn him at the stake for using a telephone?) and even fetches the invoice and puts the prices of all the books on it for her ahead of time, which saves her at least one of the queuing corrals. Then he looks at it, says gruffly, “They’re a little expensive, and last time was a bit…”, and to Lucy’s shock, writes in a twenty percent discount. Then he hands it to her.

“Are you allowed to do that?” Lucy doesn’t want him losing his job for giving out discounts, though he seems like someone that even Theodora might not immediately fire. “I mean, I appreciate it, I just…”

“You’re an academic,” Flynn says. “You’re probably broke. And you’re ordering several, we can give a reduction for that. It’s not like anyone else is going to be buying these.”

Lucy is oddly touched, not least because it’s the first thing resembling actual customer service that she has yet encountered in this place, and hints that he may in fact feel vaguely bad about how things went before. She takes the invoice when he hands it to her and prepares to go stand in line to pay, but stops. Not that it’s germane to anything, and it is not necessarily any of her business, but she asks suddenly, “How long have you worked here?”

Flynn looks startled. As is well apparent, he does not make small talk with customers, and probably does his best to ensure that they don’t want to know anything about him (or ever see him again). He looks as if he is not sure what to do with such an unexpected conversational assault. Then he says, rather tentatively, “About four years. I – it just… happened.”

“Oh.” Lucy’s surprised, since she half-expected he’s been here forever. “Do you actually – I mean, does this not seem at all weird to you?”

“Of course it’s a little weird.” A reluctant smile pulls at the corner of his mouth. “I just – I’m used to it. And when I came here, after what happened with my – ” He stops. “Never mind. It was – what I needed.”

Lucy looks at him, wondering if the name “Garcia Flynn” might sound familiar to her from somewhere else. She can’t put her finger on it, but it suddenly makes her wonder why _he_ came to London, if there’s something he was running from, the same way she was. It was the mess with her family, with her old life, so maybe it was something like that for him, and maybe he was expecting London to be a big enough place to hide for a few years, the same way she was. They look at each other an instant longer, he coughs and turns away, and she picks up her invoice and heads off to pay it. This time, one hopes, they will end up giving her the correct books when they arrive. That was… odd. Not actually horrible.

When Lucy gets back to her carrel at the IHR, she opens Google on her laptop and searches for him. It takes a bit of looking, but she finds a news story about a Croatian family attacked in the city of Split, in summer 2014, by a gang of carjackers. The mother and daughter were killed, even though the father fought to protect them, and the picture in the article is definitely her (well, not _her,_ but you know) Flynn. She almost can’t look at it, the image of a man who has just lost his entire world at once. No wonder he didn’t want to talk to a _GQ_ reporter.

Lucy blows out a slow breath, trying to decide what to make of this. She feels horrible for him, of course, as well as understanding why a place like Twyst’s, so deliberately and stubbornly cloistered from reality, from the present, from people, from everything so unbearable to him, might appear through the storm as a downright magical sanctuary. It was probably indeed what he needed, to hide deep in the stacks and pretend he never had to come up for air. Books could be his friends instead. Books are good at that.

She looks at the screen with a troubled, tender expression, then closes the screen and gets back to her research for the day. Still, it lingers in the back of her head, and she can’t quite stop thinking about it. Both Twyst’s and its manager are, to say the least, an acquired taste. But to her great surprise, Lucy wonders if she might begin to want another after all.

***

The books arrive a week and a half later, plastered with various international postage and accompanied by invoices thanking Flynn (probably sincerely, who knows how long these dusty bricks were sitting there?) for his purchase. He could in fact call Lucy to notify her of their safe arrival, but Theodora has emerged from her coffin for her quarterly inspection, and is sweeping (well, hobbling) around in her fur coat and terrifying the patrons. The sight of a telephone is sure to enrage her, and when she reaches the desk, she looks at the books with a narrow expression. “I say, Mr. Flynn, what is _that_ folderol?”

“Special order, Miss Twyst.” Flynn discreetly moves the invoice with the phone number out of sight, just in case. “They just came in.”

Theodora, who went to finishing school in Switzerland, can in fact read both French and German; she just generally prefers to pretend that the world outside Britain does not exist, or at least only as a minorly irritating triviality. “Who for?”

“Lucy – ” Flynn catches himself, knowing that Theodora will have a fit if he refers to an unfamiliar woman by her first name (“this is not a _brothel,_ Mr. Flynn!”). “Dr. Preston, at the Institute of Historical Research.”

Theodora looks vaguely pleased that they aren’t just selling to the local derelicts, but leafs through the books with a haughty expression anyway, as if to be sure that they pass muster. Then she says, “Very well, very well. We can have one of the boys deliver it.”

Flynn is always expecting Theodora to order the horse and buggy hitched up, since she once went on a thirty-minute rant about Uber, but at that, he clears his throat. “In that case, I’ll take them by at lunch.”

 _“Will_ you?” Theodora was only grudgingly cajoled into giving her workers lunch breaks to start with (she has also fired them for clocking back in two minutes late) and she looks up at him with a very beady expression. “Do you have _intentions_ upon this lady doctor, Mr. Flynn? Because really, that is the sort of gesture that makes one suspect so.”

“I – ” Flynn discovers an urgent need to cough, even as he wants to point out (but, of course, does not) that while delivering books might be a big romantic gesture in 1911 or whatever year Theodora is permanently living in, it isn’t so now. He was just trying to be – well, helpful, that was all. And maybe he wanted to do Lucy a favor. He might have been hoping a bit that she would discover more books that she needed, and come back to get them, but she hasn’t. Of course not, he thinks. Because you can get pretty much anything on Amazon, if you don’t mind selling your soul to Jeff Bezos, and because brick-and-mortar bookshops period, even the non-actively-insane ones, are having to struggle for survival. Besides, there are academic libraries and loans from partner institutions and the IHR’s own collections – a thousand and one places, in short, that Lucy could get a book, apart from here. Why come back to Twyst’s? Why come back to –

Flynn stops that dangerous line of thought short in its tracks, especially since Theodora is still eyeing him like a hawk and waiting for an answer. “No,” he says. “I was just – never mind.”

Theodora harrumphs, because she generally suspects something impolite about failing to finish your sentences, but does not immediately rain down a torrent of criticism. Then she says, “Actually, Mr. Flynn. I rather feel you should go. I need to see how this place runs without you about. Just as a matter of experiment.”

That sounds foreboding to Flynn, like Theodora is sizing him up for the chopping block and wants to see if Twyst’s does not explode into cinders the instant he walks out the door (he works every day, Monday to Friday, because Theodora thinks any store open on the weekends is clearly run by heathens). He does do his best to train the staff on the technical particulars, which was not exactly a job requirement before, and he hopes they won’t let him down too badly. He’s always been laissez-faire about how they treat customers, since he himself is the master of the dismissive attitude, and most of them get shuffled out fairly quickly anyway, so it doesn’t matter. But he can’t exactly warn them that they’re about to be inspected, with the miserable old harridan standing right there and waiting to see if he balks, and the books _do_ need to go to Lucy. So he shrugs on his jacket, hefts them into his bag, and with as much dignity as possible, makes his exit.

It is a pale, springy, blustery day, the buds out on the trees and the air close to warm, one of the days where living in London seems like a rare and unexpected pleasure, where the world is soft and glowing and the puddles splash as he steps over them. However, he is not in the right frame of mind to properly appreciate it. To hell with Ursula the Sea Witch, if she is actually going to fire him now, after everything he has put into that place. Flynn tries to tell himself that it doesn’t bother him, that he was planning to move on eventually anyway, but it does. Twyst’s would indeed have gone gentle (or not so much) into that good night, as Swansea’s most famous native son would say, if Flynn had not stepped in and taken it on his shoulders. Nobody _does_ run a business like this. Lucy’s right. Maybe he should call Theodora’s nephew, Edwin, and plan to –

Flynn is so busy fuming that he almost walks past the IHR, and has to circle around and proceed rather sheepishly inside. He asks about Lucy, is told that she’s working upstairs, and as Flynn cannot proceed any further without being a member of the Institute, someone will call her down. He waits, shifting from foot to foot and feeling unaccountably nervous, until the lift dings and she steps out, somewhat confused. At the sight of him, she looks pleased, then even more confused. “Ah,” she says. “You. Hi.”

“Yes. Me.” Flynn feels as if he is being rather dense and stating the obvious, but his brain missed a trick just there, and he is hoping she didn’t notice. He holds out the books, a wordless offering. “I thought – you might want these.”

“Oh. Yes.” Lucy takes them from him, which should mean that his part in this is concluded, that he can go. His feet remain inexplicably stuck in place instead. “That’s sweet of you, you didn’t have to bring them all the way here. I would have been happy to pick them up.”

“The Queen Bee was there,” Flynn says. “Didn’t want to risk a phone.”

Lucy looks surprised. There is a very loud pause as both of them visibly search for something else to say. Then she smiles at him, slightly shyly, and turns to go back upstairs, as Flynn – to his total mortification – blurts out, “Have – have a nice day?”

“Yes, I…” Lucy hesitates. “Well, I’m sure you have to get back to work?”

It is on the tip of Flynn’s tongue to remark that he’s not sure he’ll have work to get back to, if Theodora is content at how her dysfunctional kingdom runs without him, but he manages to avoid this. Instead, he stands there like a complete lump, watches her walk away without uttering another word whatsoever, and by the time the door of the Institute has shut behind him, is cursing himself like crazy. He is convinced the judgment of the receptionist is following him out, as is that of everyone he passes on the street.

To Flynn’s total shock, he has not been sacked by the time he returns to the store, though in typical Theodora fashion, she has left without saying another word to anybody about what she was looking for or when they might expect results. He muddles through the rest of the day in distraction, realizes that he still has Lucy’s phone number, written atop the invoice, and stares at it as if it is personally taunting him. At last, he copies it onto a Post-It note, sticks it into his pocket, and feels it like a live grenade for the entire ride home. Then he puts it on his kitchen table, reminds himself that she probably won’t pick up, and after twenty minutes of increasingly neurotic running-through all the possible worst-case scenarios (food poisoning? Meteor? Terrorist attack? She wants to see him again?) finally, _finally_ calls it.

To his horror, Lucy picks up on the third ring, slightly confused – most people tend not to answer unrecognized numbers, but it had a London area code, so maybe she thought it was someone else. “Hello?”

Flynn opens his mouth very wide like a whale about to strain krill, remembers that he was going to say something, can’t think of it, and very nearly hangs up. Instead, when the silence has gone on long enough for Lucy to repeat “Hello?” again, he blurts out, “Hi? Lucy?”

 _“Flynn?”_ It’s fair to say she’s quite surprised. “Did you – is there another book or something? I can stop by tomorrow if you – ”

“I. No. It’s not a book.” Flynn briefly considers changing his name and moving to Australia. “I was just wondering if you might want to… get dinner sometime this week?”

“What?” Lucy sounds taken aback. Oh God, of course she hates him. “Dinner?”

“It’s not a date,” Flynn babbles at once. “It’s absolutely not – it’s in no way a date. Whatsoever. Definitely, _definitely_ not a date. I just thought you might – want to.”

“Okay.” Lucy sounds a little bit hurt, although he can’t think why. “Not a date, got it. Business sort of thing?”

“Yeah.” Flynn grimaces, rubbing a hand over his face. “I mean, if you’re busy – ”

Lucy says that she’s not all that busy most evenings, no, and they settle on a new Italian place in Notting Hill that’s gotten good reviews; she says it’s close to where she lives and she can just walk over. Flynn wonders if it’s the sort of place you could believably take someone for a business dinner, and if he has just backed himself into talking about advances in arcane bookselling all night. Lucy’s an academic, she might like articles from boring trade journals, right? Hear all about the hot times at the Cambridge University Press release fair?

They agree to meet at seven PM on Thursday evening, and Flynn hangs up with his heart pounding as if he’s just run a marathon. It occurs to him that he should call the restaurant and see if they take reservations, since places in that part of town fill up fast most nights, but that feels like too much planning. If he doesn’t, he can still decide not to turn up.

Flynn bumbles through the first half of the week, leaves work at four on Thursday (nobody tell Theodora), and freshens up in a Pret bathroom before heading over. He’s early, but he hasn’t had a chance to amble along Portobello Road and all its antique shops for a while, even though it’s now mostly taken up with tourist-tack outlets and chain stores as well. As he purchases a small pocket watch, because Theodora’s hatred of smartphones means that he needs to actually keep a decent physical timepiece on him, Flynn wonders if this might actually be a date, and if so, if he’s remotely prepared to handle that. Yes, it’s been four years since his wife died, and he hasn’t so much as put a toe in the dating pool since. He doesn’t _want_ to move on. That’s the whole reason, or at least most of it, he took the job at Twyst’s. Staying stuck in the past was the entire idea and business model. It’s worked for him. But something about Lucy… he doesn’t know. She’s different. It frightens him.

He walks over to the restaurant at around six-twenty, casts an eye through the window to see how crowded it is, and thinks they should still be able to get a table if Lucy is on time. She is, it turns out, early, arriving around six-forty and looking surprised to see him already waiting. They stare at each other. She looks nice, but he doesn’t think he should tell her that. He shoves his hands in his pockets and then remembers that he should use them to open the door for her. With coughs and nods at each other, they make their way inside.

It isn’t until they’re inside and seated at a dim corner booth that anything approximating conversation gets underway, though it’s still rather stilted. At one point, however, Lucy calls him Garcia, and Flynn slews to a sudden halt, fairly sure he hasn’t told her that. “Wait. How did you – how did you know that?”

“I…” Lucy’s cheeks are pink, visible even in the atmospheric candlelight (this was a risky choice for a business dinner). “I looked you up. I… I’m sorry.”

Flynn wonders if he should remonstrate her for this, but the information is in the public domain, Lucy has a right to be curious, and she just used his first name, not an Unforgivable Curse. (Twyst’s would be a great place for Harry Potter parties, if You-Know-Who allowed them.) It’s just been a while since anyone has, and he suddenly wonders if she’s here out of pity for the widower and bereaved father, since Lucy seems like a nice person who would think he was lonely and volunteer to keep him company. He _is_ lonely. He is so lonely that it eats out his heart and gnaws away, little by little, at his soul. He’s an introvert at heart, gruff and solitary, but there is that other saying, about how no man is an island. He’s become one, somehow, and has no idea how to swim back to shore.

“I’m sorry,” Lucy repeats again, as if worried that she’s upset him. “I didn’t – I didn’t mean to pry. I was just… I wanted to know.”

“It’s all right.” Flynn’s fist clenches a bit too hard on his wine glass, and he has to put it down. “So I suppose you know why I came to London.”

Lucy looks at him with soft, gentle, sad dark eyes, her hand briefly moving as if she was going to put it over his, but thought better of it. At last she says, “I understand. A little of it. I didn’t lose my family the same way you did, but I – I still lost them.”

Flynn is about to remind himself of the feeble and wretched lie that this is a business dinner and they should not be sharing too many personal reminisces, but he cannot get the words to his lips, probably for the best. Lucy hesitates, then starts telling him about her difficult mother, her beloved father who died from lung cancer and then turned out to not be her real dad, her family’s involvement with one of those weird cults that she had to separate herself from, the struggle with her sister and suddenly losing her job at Stanford, her world turning out from under her and clinging to the first lifeline that was thrown to her. It happened to be at the IHR, and she’s grateful. London has been the same thing for her that it was for him. Maybe she recognized that, that was all.

As she finishes, Flynn sits there, trying to think what to say. He is aware that, much as it might not be a good idea, he is nonetheless, bit by bit, slowly and inescapably, starting to fall in love with her. Or maybe it’s not that, just the sheer relief of meeting a kindred spirit, but it doesn’t feel like just a passing fancy or an easy crush. It locks his tongue and rattles his protective cocoon. He doesn’t deserve her, does he? Or this. Happiness. Solace. Ease.

They stay late at the restaurant, and go through two bottles of wine. Lucy remarks wryly that he shouldn’t take this the wrong way, but she can’t believe that of all the people she’s met here, the grumpy insane-bookstore manager is the easiest to talk to. Finally, it’s late, the restaurant is near close, and Flynn pays the check and walks Lucy back to her place, ten minutes away. The night is cool and soft and slow.

“That was – fun,” he says, once he has seen Lucy to the garden gate. “Thanks.”

She smiles at him, hand on the latch.

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, it was.”

(That smile does not leave his thoughts for the next three days.)

***

He said it was not a date, _insisted_ it wasn’t, and Lucy wants to respect that. She’s slowly realizing that Flynn isn’t terrifying so much as clueless, at least when it comes to actually dealing with people whose opinion he might care about, and she has tried to tell herself that she’s fine with it if they just end up being oddball friends. He is the first person she’s met here who she really wants to see more of (to her own surprise as much as anyone’s) and maybe that’s skewing her judgment, that she’s just forgotten how it felt to hang out with someone for no reason besides that you want to. But she keeps thinking about it all the next day Friday, and then over the weekend. She calls Amy, since they do Skype fairly regularly, and ends up telling her all about it. By the time she’s finished, Amy is just sitting there with an extremely knowing look on her face and says, “So, are you two going to go out again?”

“He said it wasn’t a date,” Lucy reminds her. “And he lost his wife in a pretty horrible way, a couple years ago. I don’t want to presume.”

“Well,” Amy says. “It sure sounds like a date to me. You could at least say you wanted to meet him again, for another quote-unquote business dinner, and see where that goes.”

“I don’t know,” Lucy stalls. “I don’t think – ”

“Do you want to see him again?” Amy interrupts. “Yes or no?”

“I… yes.” Lucy looks down, not quite able to hide her smile. “Yes, I want to.”

“So,” Amy prods. “Call him back.”

“Maybe,” Lucy says. _“Maybe.”_

Unable to escape Amy’s knowing looks for the rest of the call, she pointedly changes the subject to how the podcast is going, and when they hang up, it is her turn to stare in low-level existential horror at Flynn’s number on her phone. Yes, they did have a nice time the other night, but what if he actually just meant what he said, and while he enjoyed her company, there was no latent romantic subtext? She finds it incredibly hard to read him. One day he’s actively preventing her from getting her book, the next he turns up all the way in damn Swansea to shove it at her and run away, he delivers her order by hand and then calls for a Not a Date, and now… she doesn’t have any clue whether or not to risk it.

At last, however, she hits Call, since it’s that or throw herself out the window. She hopes he won’t answer. He might hope he won’t either. But either way, he does.

They make plans for dinner a week from now, in Greenwich. They both manage to sound relatively normal while they do this. If Flynn hangs up and screams silently into the void, as Lucy does, there is no way to know for sure.

***

The place in Greenwich is a bit of a dive, frankly, but they have a good time anyway, and the days are long enough by now that it’s pink and blue and gold, the sun melting like butter low in the west, by the time they get out and walk along the waterfront. The Old Royal Naval College and the Greenwich Observatory preside magisterially on the bank, and their hands brush a few times, pinkies unconsciously linking, before they remember themselves and quickly pull back. The fourth or fifth time this happens, however, they seem unsure whether to pull away if the other doesn’t first. Since they don’t, their hands remain where they are, and then, very slowly, Flynn takes hold of hers. His fingers are long and rough and elegant, and they easily engulf hers, making her pulse skip a brief beat in her throat. They look at each other, then look away, and walk for two or three minutes in perfect silence. Then they reach an overlook over the Thames, stop, and lean against the railing as casually as they can, watching one of the river clippers chug by. The city gleams in the middle distance. Planes fly low into London City Airport, and the Shard’s very top still catches sunlight.

Just then, before she can stop it, Lucy wonders if there’s any way to kiss him right now, and isn’t sure. For one thing, Flynn is a foot taller than her, she’d have to pull him down to her level, and there’s no way to do _that_ inconspicuously. But she wants it, she wants it almost enough to risk trying, and she puts a hand timidly on his shoulder, trying to turn him around. He does, and looks down at her. The air seems briefly charged, the world in waiting.

“Hey,” Lucy whispers, a little shakily. “Can you – do you maybe want to – ?”

She doesn’t even know what she’s asking for, aside from just this. Flynn continues to stare down at her, startled and off his footing, but there’s a look in his eyes that she feels like warm golden butter, sinking into her bones, shaping and sustaining her. He does not, however, lean down. He steps forward, reaches out with his arms as if still not sure that this is what human people do with them, and draws her clumsily into them.

Lucy’s breath lets out in a shudder. She wraps both of her own arms around his torso, presses her face into his chest, can tuck her head neatly beneath his chin. He holds her without a word, the bulwark of his body muffling the surrounding sounds of the evening, until all she can hear is her heart and his, keeping a slow time like the hands of the Observatory clock, wheeling to mark the heavens. She keeps her eyes closed, and doesn’t know if, right now, she can stand to wake up.

Flynn walks her to the DLR station, where she can get the train for Bank. He doesn’t let go of her hand the whole way, and the ungiven kiss lingers in the air thicker than the twilight. It is there, it flickers closer each time they look at each other, but does not quite come to form. Instead, still, it waits.

***

Flynn wakes up the next morning wondering if he should call a florist and have a nice arrangement sent to Lucy at the IHR, before he realizes that that would be definitely and unambiguously categorized as a date, and he needs to decide whether he’s going that far or not. It’s Friday, and he can’t stop wondering if she has any plans for the weekend. The weather is getting nicer, there are festivals and food fairs and the usual things to do around London. He is so distracted on the ride to work that he nearly misses his stop, and when he reaches Twyst’s, is extremely startled to discover Theodora, fur coat and all, waiting for him on the front step. “Not like you to be late, Mr. Flynn,” she says, as he unlocks the door and lets them both in. “Something on your mind?”

Since Theodora is generally uninterested in the personal lives of her social inferiors (or in her mind, everyone), Flynn is startled by the question. He debates whether to answer honestly or not. Theodora hates “Nothing” as an answer (“if it was _nothing,_ I wouldn’t have asked, now _would_ I?”) and he is not sure where she stands on the ethics of dating customers. Probably would be horrified to hear that he was exposing himself to them outside of mandatory business hours, and he still doesn’t know if she’s actually here to sack him. “No,” he says. “Just… tired.”

Theodora sniffs, as she feels that the working class should be happy to spring up with the lark and rush to serve their rightful masters, but does not press it. Instead, she says, “You know, the other day, when I was in here. It struck me that you have really done quite a splendid job with the old place, Mr. Flynn. Made it just the way I want it. A true achievement.”

Flynn is flabbergasted, because Theodora, to say the least, does not dole out praise or accolades, and even in four years of working here with increasing levels of responsibility, she has never outright told him that he has done a good job. And yet, something about hearing it now strikes him the wrong way. The way Theodora wants this place is purposefully unhelpful, creaking, backward, a fortress and a closed-off castle, where the peasants can sometimes come to poke about and even take bits home, but are never welcome and never encouraged to stay. A monument to a vanished past, impossible to reclaim, even as the world spills and rushes on around it, like a boulder in the stream. He doesn’t know, suddenly, that he’s all that proud of that legacy. It’s been what he needed, yes, but –

“You know,” Theodora goes on. “I’ve decided that I _am_ going to cut Edwin out of my will. After all, he would _ruin_ it, and I shan’t have that. I’ve decided to make you the heir to it instead, Mr. Flynn, since I can have every confidence it will continue as it does now. Edwin wants to _modernize_ it, we both know, and that is not going to happen so long as I have any say in the matter. Agree, and I’ll be down to my solicitor’s office straightaway.”

If being told that he was doing a good job startled Flynn, this just about floors him. He turns toward her slowly, trying to think how to possibly respond. Once, this is all he would have wanted, to be given free rein of the place and told that he never had to come out or do anything different, never had to move past the moment he was where he went in, frozen in glass, walled away. There is still something vestigial, alluring, about the idea. And yet.

“I don’t think you should do that,” he says. “Or if you do, I can’t promise that I won’t just hand it over to Edwin anyway.”

Theodora stares at him, not expecting to hear such heresy out of the mouth of her loyal deputy. “I beg your pardon, Mr. Flynn?”

“I’ve had some time to think.” Flynn straightens a stack of carbon-paper receipt forms. “I don’t know that I’d keep it this way. I think there’s something to be said for things evolving. Living in the present.”

The disapproving moue of Theodora’s mouth almost disappears. “I strongly disagree, and indeed, I’m quite startled to hear you say so, Mr. Flynn. I never was under the impression that there was any conflict on your part with my business practices.”

“There wasn’t before,” Flynn says – after all, honestly. “I’ve just changed my mind.”

“How disappointing.” Theodora gives him her imperious, icy stare, which is usually the last sight of plenty of unfortunate Twyst’s employees before the axe comes down. “Is there some particular reason for this craven stoop to the level of the common folk, Mr. Flynn?”

There is, of course, a reason. But the last thing Flynn wants is to be discussing the fraught subject of Lucy Preston with his despotic overlady, when he himself is so far from settled on his own feelings. Instead he says, “You can, of course, do whatever you want, Miss Twyst. I just thought it was polite to inform you.”

Theodora stares at him as if waiting for him to recant, seeing if this is some sort of negotiating tactic for higher wages, or anything else she deplores about basically everything and everyone involved here. Which, Flynn thinks, is rather baffling. Selling books – and indeed, books in general – are one of the few redeeming factors about the entire human race. This strange, curious, often-genocidal advanced race of apes, who have somehow become masters of a pale blue dot in the outer arm of a rural galaxy, who are smaller than dust in the cosmic scheme of things, and whose imagination knows no limits. They have gone to map out how far that great space stretches, and they have come up with constant stories of any and every sort. They have always loved them. First they told them in the flickering fires of a prehistoric night and painted them on cave walls, and then they learned to write, and they began to read, and they never stopped. Nowadays there are many ways you can access it – a book, a movie, a TV series, a webzine, a podcast, a graphic novel, on and on, an embarrassment of riches. Theodora is wrong. The people who think the only good stories are written by dead white men on fusty old paper are wrong. And if you are selling books and trading words and memories real and imagined, you should, Flynn feels, enjoy it. You should make people _want_ to come here, and to return. You don’t lock it up and throw away the key.

When he doesn’t say anything else, or reveal that it was just a joke (and Theodora hates jokes, since of course she does), she sniffs. She seems a little disappointed, perhaps, as if she really was hanging her hat on him as her equally miserable successor, and Flynn feels obliquely bad, but not enough to change his mind. He wants to tell Theodora to walk outside for once, among the throngs of people she so disdains, and see the sunshine (that is, if she won’t immediately crumble to dust). He wants to tell her to buy a coffee in a takeaway cup, and sit on a park bench on Embankment and watch the world go by, and the blooming buds blow off the branches of the trees. He wonders if it might change her mind.

And yet, he supposes, it won’t. She’s too old and too set in her ways and too wrapped up in all the stupid rules and ideas and systems that people make for themselves and chain themselves to so ludicrously, and her decision suddenly doesn’t matter to Garcia Flynn very much anymore. He knows what he wants to do, instead. He wants to call the florist, and order those flowers, and he wants to see Lucy Preston tonight. He would preferably also like to see her many days after that, but that, as ever, is up to her. He doesn’t want to presume.

And so, feeling like Dorothy after having thrown the bucket on the Wicked Witch, Flynn takes out his phone – right in front of Theodora – and does exactly that.

***

“I lost my job,” Flynn says, as they’re strolling hand-in-hand through Marylebone and the world is violet and gold and peace, the trees glitter with lights, and they flow along in a human tide. He doesn’t sound that concerned about it. “How was your day?”

“What?” Lucy stops, pulling him to a halt. “Oh no. She fired you?”

“More or less.” Flynn shrugs. “Did you get the – ?”

In answer, Lucy waves a hand, rather shyly, as if to say that of course she got the flowers and that was why she came to meet him here this evening. Still, she wants to go back to his previous remark. “Are you all right? I know how much that place meant to you.”

“It did,” Flynn says. “And it does. But I’m going to call Edwin Twyst tomorrow. I have a feeling I’ll be offered it back before too long, and I have a few ideas about what to do with it when that happens. It’s one of the most iconic bookstores in London, for God’s sake, and entirely for the wrong reasons. I think there’s a lot of remodeling to be done. You could help.” He pauses, suddenly uncertain. “You know. If you wanted to.”

Lucy regards him, wanting to press for details of exactly what happened, but feeling that they are, in some sense, irrelevant. He seems quite at peace with letting go of what Twyst’s used to be, what it represented, and it touches her deeply, even as she reminds herself that it’s probably incidental to whatever strange, slow, fragile thing is blooming between the two of them. But maybe it’s not. Maybe it means something, and maybe it can.

“Well,” she says, as lightly as she can. “So what? You think Theodora is going to never keel over, just out of spite?”

“I’m sure she’ll try.” Flynn grins, suddenly and mischievously, which lifts his grim mouth and makes his eyes sparkle. “But you know, even witches melt.”

Lucy laughs, feeling it half like a sob in her chest, and squeezes his hands. He turns to face her, and as before, she tries to find the words, to ask him to just bend down a damn bit, because she wants to kiss him more than anything else in the world and to everyone’s vast surprise, he has turned out to be infinitely preferable to Hugh Grant. But she’s still afraid of rejection, the part of her that could never do her homework well enough for Professor Carol Preston, who broke up with Noah when he was perfectly fine, who lost her own job at Stanford and has somehow washed up here. She could help remake Twyst’s, in fact, as he suggests. She might be very good at it. But that implies permanency, of some sort. Putting down roots. She was always planning to keep running, once she was done here, if only because there seemed like nothing else to do. And if she stopped –

“I don’t know,” she starts to say. “Maybe you should keep the Victorian madhouse flavor. Just for old time’s – ”

Lucy does not get any further, because for once in his life, Garcia Flynn does not spectacularly miss the chance for a grand romantic gesture. He wraps both arms around her, sweeps her off her feet, and they kiss for so long that Lucy expects Theodora to materialize on the spot and file a public complaint. But she doesn’t, and it goes on, and her hands slide into Flynn’s hair, she turns his head just so, they open their mouths, and it is soft, searching, slow and sweet, deep and thorough. It is not everything it could ever be, because it could not possibly be that. It is not everything, because it is not the end. Instead, it is the start of something, a door opened, a blank book turned to a new page, and a pen poised to write. As ever, as always, the story will have to be told.

After a very long moment, perhaps remembering that they are in public, Flynn puts her down. Both of them look completely stunned. They clear their throat, try to say something, and fail in unison. They meet each other’s gaze, giggle, and look away. “Well,” Flynn says. “I – well. Maybe we should go find dinner.”

“Yes,” Lucy agrees, with as much dignity as she possibly can. “We should – we should definitely do that.”

They take hands again, her mouth still burning with the lingering taste of his, and start down the street. There is a peculiar ageless mystery about London at night, the modern buildings that stand cheek to jowl with ancient Roman walls and medieval churches and the staggering stone arches of Westminster Abbey, the bells that call the hour, the neon glow of fast-food joints and coffee shops, the winding side lanes that lead to the riverfront, and the sudden shadow of Tudor half-timbers and cobblestones just steps from a major international bank, Deliveroo drivers on bicycles and red double-decker buses, and people, people, _people._ The Tube rattles below your feet, and the illuminated face of Big Ben gleams like a pearl, waiting for Peter Pan to land on its great hands and soar away again, and perhaps you feed the birds on the steps of St. Paul’s, and you make your small part in the tale. And so, above the lovers, if you like, through the pinkening haze, the evening star winks its eye.

**THE END.**


End file.
